The moment that Vince
Gilligan announced that he was doing a new TV show with Rhea Seehorn I didn't
need to know any other details to know that even if this was considered by
critics the absolute worst shows in the history of television I was going to watch
every episode that aired regardless. When you create one of the greatest shows
in the history of television and then create a prequel that is so good there's
debate whether its better than one of the greatest shows in the history of
television, you've earned a measure of goodwill so big it could fill the Grand
Canyon.
That he was doing so with Rhea Seehorn was
even more incredible. I think I speak for everyone who watched Better Call Saul that the closer the show got to the present
and the longer Kim Wexler was still alive the more openly terrified you were.
The thing about a prequel is that characters from the original source material
have plot armor but everyone else doesn't. Saul Goodman, Mike Erhmantraut and
eventually Gustavo Fring did (albeit so that when they met Walter White he
would destroy them either by killing them or just by being in his presence) but
almost every other regular did not. And because there was no sign Saul had a
girlfriend or wife in Breaking Bad you became more terrified with each
passing season and Kim will still in Jimmy's life. By the time we reached the
second half of the final season I was certain the only way out for Kim was at
the hands of the cartel. (Spoiler: she survived. 'Lived' in a strong word'.
Gilligan went out of his way
to make sure the details for his project remained under wraps and Apple TV gave
him the same largesse that AMC did. By the time Plur1bus was finally
announced in the spring of 2025 they'd given it a renewal for a second season.
By the time it came out some details were available, most notably that it
seemed to involve an extraterrestrial invasion.
And of course the moment any
TV fan worth their salt heard this their minds naturally turned to Gilligan's
origin story: his eight years writing for The X-Files. Those of you
who've read my previous articles on The X-Files and Gilligan might be
somewhat surprised to know that while he wrote thirty scripts for the series,
either on his own or in collaboration he never wrote a single script
that had anything to do with the mytharc. In my series on Gilligan and The
X-Files I'm going to actually explain why that was the right choice for
Gilligan and the series but for now I'll just repeat that Gilligan learned
quite a few lessons from showrunner Chris Carter. And in the case of a mytharc
that was what was not to do.
Carter never had a bible for
The X-Files. Both Breaking Bad
and Better Call Saul had a lot of planning within each season as to
where they were going, if not always knowing how to get there. Carter never had
a clear blueprint for any of his character's history. Gilligan had the broad
strokes for Breaking Bad and made sure that they fit within the contours
of Better Call Saul when the prequel was written. The X-Files ran past its end date. Breaking
Bad and Saul had fixed ones.
The biggest problem with the
alien invasion of The X-Files is, of course, it never happened. Carter
kept promising with ominous phrases like 'the date is set' but the date kept
getting pushed back the bigger hit the series came. The bigger the conspiracy
became, the more irrelevant to the action Mulder and Scully increasingly
became. The forms the aliens were going to take, what they were going to do,
changed the depending on the season and eventually became incoherent. Gilligan
would occasionally gently satirize it in his later scripts but it was never his
deal.
So I can imagine a
conversation between Chris Carter and Gilligan after the series ended joking:
Gilligan: Nine seasons and
the aliens never came.
Carter: Well maybe they'll
come in the movie.
Gilligan: Chris I gotta tell
you if you'd let me help with the mythology I could have made it work and make
sense.
Carter: Before or after you
sell that crazy idea of a chemistry teacher cooking meth in an RV?
(Both men laugh, knowing
full well it'll never happen)
Gilligan: "You're
probably right. Still someday I'd like to prove you wrong.
Carter: "Like Hal from
Malcolm in the Middle would work as Walter?"
Now imagine Carter in
November in 2025 watching the Pilot of Plur1bus. I almost expected the ending
of the first episode to have a message saying: "To Chris Carter: I Made
This."
It took me way too long to
get around to watching the first two episodes of Plur1bus by which point
it was clear to the world that Gilligan had made another masterpiece. It has
already made multiple top ten lists for 2025 and both the show and Seehorn have
been nominated for Best Drama and Best Actress. To date Seehorn has won the
Golden Globe and Critics Choice Award in that latter category and barring an
alien invasion will finally get the Emmy she should have won for Better Call
Saul. (I hope the hive mind came for the Emmy judges who decided that
Jennifer Coolidge's work in The White Lotus was a dramatic performance.)
The reason I think Carter
would be watching the entire first two episodes
(all that I've seen to this point) shaking his head is because it's clear that
Gilligan has finally done something The X-Files would not do in nine
seasons, two movies and two revival seasons. And to show just how brilliant
Gilligan is let's review how his alien invasion works:
1. He shows every detail of
how the aliens get here.
We see a satellite
transmitted, then a bunch of scientists puzzling over the message they've
gotten and its form. We see two scientists trying to figure out how its being
delivered in quinary form. They make a realization what it is, even though it's
not spelled out, simply showing a lot of testing on animals.
Then we see two people who
are there to gas lab animals, something they've been doing for a very long
time. They go to the lab where it looks like one of the rats is already dead.
One of the scientists takes the rat out of its cage and finds out its alive.
Then it bites her.
She runs to the sink while
the other exterminator chases the rat. While she's scrubbing she begins to
shake violently. The other exterminator grabs her and hauls her into the
shower. We cut away where the security guard is trying to get something from a
vending machine. He's so distracted pursuing the Fritos he barely notices when
she grabs him – and kisses him. We then see her colleague grabbing and kissing
a janitor.
Then we see the entire staff
licking and swabbing a series of sample dishes and putting them in something.
They do so in a mechanical rote fashion. As they do so a group of military
police come in and automatically begin doing the same thing. The implications
are absolutely terrifying.
2. We see the actual invasion
albeit in vague terms
Carol Sturka is returning to
Albuquerque with her wife Helen from a book tour. They go to a bar for a drink.
When they go out for a smoke, the TV cuts to a news story of an airbase being
locked down. While the two are outside answering her mail, Carol notices what
she thinks are planes flying in a strange pattern. Then the two of them go back
to it and see a truck crash into a neighboring car. Carol runs to help and finds
that the driver is shaking violently and she can't move him. She yells to
Helen, only to see her collapse. She runs into the bar to get help…and sees
everybody there frozen in place unable to move. She gets on the phone and finds
that emergency services aren't answering. She gets Helen into a truck at great
effort and drives down the road. She sees an ambulance hauled over the one
side…and then sees the entire town in flames and discord.
What she finds when she gets
to the hospital is such a horror show I will leave to those who have yet to see
it to discover. What I will say is that this and so much of what follows is
another great strength of Plur1bus.
3. Show don't tell.
The term 'Carter-speak' is a
derogatory term for just how much of the purple, languorous dialogue and
monologue's Carter wrote during his tenure on The X-Files: dialogue that
sounded portentous but you couldn't imagine a real person saying. It made some
of the things George Lucas wrote for Star Wars sound like Shakespeare by
comparison.
By contrast all of the
horrors I've described and almost everything that follows takes place in near
total silence. This is particularly true in the pilot both in the sequence
above and the entire period that Carol realizes something horrible is happening
but can't grasp it. Gilligan has always been one of the greatest masters of
directing and long silence sequence where we follow a character's actions but
never directly explaining it. In the pilot he reaches new heights with this in
a sci-fi construct that is clearly closer to pure horror than anything he's
done in a quarter of a century. As a result when the alien intelligence finally
speaks to Carol it has more power than any long expository dialogue could be.
This is made even clearer in
the opening of the second episode where we meet Zosia (Karolina Wydra) in an unidentified
but clearly Middle Eastern country. We see an extended sequence watching an unidentified
figure moving through where smoke is rising and bodies are everywhere. She
helps them to a certain place, gets into a car, drives to an airstrip. We then
watching her move efficiently to a prop plane and slowly but surely turn on
every engine. After the opening credits we see Carol awaken from an alcoholic
stupor and then look at the body of Helen with despair. We then see the plane
land in New Mexico and Zosia walk through a deserted airport, then taking off
all her clothes and walking naked to a bathroom where other aliens are cleaning
up. It is only after nearly thirteen minutes of the episode are over that we
hear Zosia utter her first line of dialogue to Carol.
I haven't seen a bravura
sequence of this kind of exposition since the opening episode of Season 5 of The
Americans where we watched Philip and Elizabeth, along with a colleague,
dig up a grave. And it is the complete opposite of nearly every over-expository
episode I've seen of The X-Files.
4. Make the aliens takeover
of this planet seem like a good thing.
It was a given for everything
we saw on The X-Files over the mytharc that the aliens were planning to
colonize and turn us into a slave race. Now we see the exact same thing happen –
but the new alien overlords are actually so nice and pleasant. All of them,
especially Zosia, are trying everything they can to be pleasant to Carol and
not upset here. They accommodate her every need including the second episode
when she has to bury her wife. They agree to have her meet five of the other
people who speak English as a second or third language. There are thirteen who
are unaffected.
Furthermore the first five
we meet all seem perfectly happy with the idea of the alien takeover. One of
them, a gentleman from Mauritania, tells her that there is finally no war, no
crime or poverty, no one in prison, and all the animals from the zoo have been
set free. Perhaps most tellingly Carol is not merely the only American who
seemed unaffected but is also a white woman while all the others seem to be
people of color. (The fact that 'Carol' is not that far removed from the name
Karen can't be a coincidence.) More importantly four for of the people still
alive they still have all of their families still alive, albeit as part of this
hive. Carol has lost the only person closest to her and it was clear in the pilot
that Helen was the only one who ever could tolerate her bad behavior.
What's more Zosia makes it
clear that they don't kill, even animals or insects, are perfectly fine being
used sexually and are giving those who are still alive free will. They don't
want to hurt the feelings of those who are still alive in anyway. And that
brings me to…
5. Make the alien's one
weakness something we haven't seen before.
It's clear in the second
episode the real weakness the aliens have is Carol's rage. There's something in
their biological makeup that when Carol expresses outrage it hurts them
physically to the point it can kill them. When Carol has an outburst we
eventually learn 11 million people die as a result. The fact that one of them
happens to be the grandfather of one of the sole surviving humans doesn't
endear her to them anymore.
This is a reversal of almost
every alien invasion story we've seen including The X-Files where every
alien we met was an unemotional killing machine, unbothered by human emotions.
That the aliens can be killed not with a stiletto or a bizarre metal but with one
simply shouting at them has to be an in-joke for Carter as well.
6. Punctuate the horrors with small and
occasionally sly details.
When Carol goes home after
everything she naturally goes to the TV and changes every channel and gets
nothing but static or bars except for the CW, which doesn't broadcast in her
area anymore. Eventually she tunes to a channel and sees a man and a suit and
thinks the government its work. In fact it's C-SPAN and its clear the cameras
never got destroyed because they never use satellites to broadcast.
When the channel broadcasts
a message for her it tells her to use the landline because all cell service is
down.
7. Your lead must be a
strong female protagonist who has absolutely no time for the foolishness of
other people.
All right that was actually
a good lesson to take from The
X-Files considering how Gillian Anderson's Scully is one of the most iconic
characters in TV history. And
considering just how many shows have been focused on White Male Antiheroes
there's something to be said by making your lead character a Dour Blonde
Lesbian.
Even here I can't help but
wonder if Carol Sturka's pre-invasion occupation of a paranormal romance author
is a private dig at the kind of overwritten prose that Carter used to have on a
daily basis. And the way there are so many devoted fans obsessed with the
trivia of Carol's books is clearly a parody of the fan culture that
surrounded The X-Files at the start. The fact that they're predominantly
female housewives doesn't make them any less ridiculous then the fanboys and
shippers we had to deal with on The X-Files. And the fact that Carol has
to deal with them every time a book comes out and treats them with enormous
scorn is a big poke at them too.
What's magnificent about Seehorn's
performance in the first two episodes is that Carol is absolutely right about
the threat these creatures are. They admit that just by coming here they killed
nearly 900 million people and she's just as right about calling the survivors
traitors to the human race. But she's
also blinded by the fact that she's so angry she doesn't seem willing to ask
the right questions, so blinded by revenge that its not until she's having
dinner and getting drunk that everyone else starts asking about certain things
involving the aliens. (In keeping with the previous point, they want to know if
it's just for food.)
As Gilligan knows better
than anyone else when you tell a sci-fi narrative you'd better be able to
deliver at the end. He saw firsthand how this played out with The X-Files and
so much of the 21st century has seen so many sci-fi fantasy
masterpieces have endings which to this day have been polarizing to say the
least, from Battlestar Galactica to Lost to Game of Thrones. As
we speak many are already wondering if Severance will be able to keep
those plates in the air whenever it comes to an end.
It is no doubt far too early
to see how this will go: not even Gilligan can tell us when Season 2 will be
coming out. However he says at most he intends to end Plur1bus in four.
That itself shows me Gilligan learned another less from his time on The
X-Files: don't spin your story out until it becomes incoherent. To be fair
Gilligan made that decision with Breaking Bad and that played out with Better
Call Saul each of which are considering to have the greatest endings of any
series in television history.
What I know already is I don't
want to believe the hype for Plur1bus. It is everything that the world
has already seen. And what I hope is out there is an Emmy for Seehorn and
eventually a lot of Emmys for the show and for Gilligan. They may not all come
this September but when it comes to this combination, trust Vince Gilligan.
My Score: 5 stars.
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